And the Best Picture goes to....

It’s really funny yet really sad…an ultimate tear jerker!

Great performances with quirky characters and a memorable music score, “Terms of Endearment” explores the often-complicated bond between a particular mother and daughter, played respectively by Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger.

Starting off with Aurora Greenway—she’s vain, hard to please and often self-absorbed, but when she learns that her child has cancer, she goes into protective mother mode and never leaves her side.  Shirley MacLaine won her Oscar for this role and through most of the film you want to hate her for her controlling, overbearing ways.  But then she can be so neurotic that you can’t help but laugh by her actions.

Debra Winger plays the daughter, Emma, who despite being more down to earth, marries a man that her mother doesn’t approve of.  She does have a pivotal role in this film with her unhappy marriage and untimely illness, for which I believe Winger would have won an Oscar had she been nominated for Supporting Actress as opposed to Leading.  The scene in the hospital with her two sons can be heart wrenching to watch and she pulls it off.   

Not to overlook the men in this cast.  We have Jack Nicholson as Aurora’s next-door neighbor, the drunken, skirt-chasing astronaut Garrett Breedlove.  He has a free spirit persona that succeeds in cracking Aurora’s icy façade and makes her face love again.   Jeff Daniels and John Lithgow turn in some pretty terrific performances as well.

Though the focus of this story is known for being about the mother /daughter relationship I think that in a larger way it’s more about parent/child relationships—it’s not just about Aurora and Emma, but Emma and Tommy as well.  It’s overshadowed, but through the beginning of the film you can see that Tommy adores his mother and he is probably the one that has the most difficult time and deals with her illness with anger and resentment—which leads to an unforgettable exchange with MacLaine in the hospital parking lot.

Great film!